The Black Mountains Page 5

  “Old busy-body,” Ted had muttered shamefacedly, but Charlotte, angrier than he had ever seen her, had taken her neighbour’s side.

  “It’s a good thing she’s there to keep an eye on you!” she told Ted. “ I can’t be everywhere at once and it seems I can’t even trust you to go to chapel now. Well, you may be sure if you think of doing such a thing again, Mrs Durrant will be in here to tell me about it before you can say Jack Robinson!”

  Ted had wriggled away, subdued, and since that day had sat obediently each Sunday with the other boys in the hard, ricketty pew, enduring the agonies of a stiff collar. But he had not listened to the service, for he was too busy dreaming of ways to get his own back on Martha, who sat directly behind him and reminded him all the while of her presence by her daunting soprano voice and her irritating habit of holding the notes a beat or two longer than anyone else.

  Yes, if Martha was good, Ted decided, she was a living reminder of how much more fun it was to be bad. For all the goodness in the world didn’t seem to have made her very happy—or persuaded others to like her!

  On the last Sunday in August 1911, however, as he lay in bed luxuriating in the glorious knowledge that this morning, at least, Charlotte would not be after him to get up or be late for work, Martha Durrant was far from his thoughts. The baby, crying for his early feed, had woken him, and unlike his brothers, he had not gone back to sleep. Carefully he raised himself on one elbow and looked at them.

  Beside him in the narrow bed they had shared since they were children, Fred was snoring peacefully, while in the second bed, set at right angles to theirs, Jack and Jim lay side by side. Of Jim, there was nothing to be seen but a lump under the blankets, but the sunlight that streamed through the window in broad bands made Jack’s sleeping face look younger and more childish than ever.

  It was probably just as well he was going back to school, thought Ted; Jack wasn’t really cut out for working at the pit. Mam had been right about that. And Ted wasn’t even sure he wanted him there. The men could be very crude sometimes, and although he was less than two years older than his brother, he felt oddly protective of him.

  Ted lay back, pillowing his head on his arms, and thinking back to the day he had started work at South Hill Pit. He’d been proud, so proud, swinging down the hill with his father and brothers, his sandwiches tied in a clean red handkerchief and his can of cold tea banging against his thigh.

  He hadn’t minded the ribbing he’d taken from the men. He hadn’t even minded at first that he was only working on the screens, sorting coal, hour after tedious hour. It was enough that he could no longer be termed a schoolboy, and that at the end of the week he would collect his first wages. But soon boredom set in, and Ted was looking for ways to make the day pass more quickly and raise a laugh.

  Before long he had a reputation not unlike the one he had in the rank. And one day he had played a prank that made him chuckle even now to think of it.

  On his way to work, he found a pair of pink flannel bloomers in a bush. How they had got there, he could not imagine, but Ted did not stop to investigate. Seeing the fun to be had, he rolled them up and took them to the pit with him. During a lull in the morning’s work, he pulled them on over his pit trousers and pranced about, pretending to be the bow-legged wife of the gaffer. The other lads fell about laughing, until the gaffer came over to investigate.

  He had no way of proving that the caricature was of his wife, but Ted knew he suspected and should have been warned. But typically, he took little notice. He stuffed the bloomers under a tub, until later in the day he managed to get behind one of the hauliers who was waiting for a load of coal, and then pinned them to his jacket.

  The haulier was blissfully unaware of what had happened. He strutted about the yard, only mildly puzzled by the hoots of laughter that followed him. Then, when his cart was loaded, he drove off, the bloomers blowing behind him. Ted and the other lads thought it so funny they hardly took gaffer seriously when he came over and told Ted furiously that was the last trick he would play under his control.

  Just how serious he was, however, Ted learned that evening when James got home.

  He came in, white with anger, and called Ted into the kitchen.

  “I’ve never been so ashamed in all my life!” he told him. “O’Halloran himself sent for me when I came up this afternoon, and told me the gaffer can’t do a thing with you. He was all for getting rid of you there and then as a trouble-maker, but as a favour to me, you’re getting another chance. You’re starting underground tomorrow, as my carting boy, but if you don’t behave yourself, that’ll be it.”

  Ted said nothing. He was sorry his father had taken a carpeting over something that was not his fault, but he was not sorry to be going underground—he had been looking forward to it. And he knew, from the very first moment when the cage began its descent through the dank earth, taking him to the seams where coal was hewed, that he would never regret pinning the bloomers on the haulier and getting on the wrong side of the gaffer.

  Carting was painful, he soon discovered. It was hot, sweaty work, and there were times when so many parts of his body ached that he could hardly separate one from the other. But it had its compensations. Scraped knees and a raw waist were a small price to pay for the privilege of squatting alongside the colliers, tea can between knees, munching cogknockers of bread and tossing crumbs to the mice that scuttled up from everywhere as soon as they smelled food. And who wouldn’t drag a little extra coal in their putt if it also meant a little extra pay at the end of the week? Ted soon realized how much he liked money when he discovered how the thought of it could ease the sting of a raw wound in the middle of the night.

  As for the other things he learned, some of them could still make him blush, especially when his father was in earshot. But he listened with open-mouthed interest as the older lads swopped tales of their conquests among women, and discussed the prices of the local whores, who, it seemed, demanded anything from a glass of cider to a whole week’s wages for their favours.

  He learned too to gamble, on ‘anything that moved,’ from the twist of a playing card to the speed of a cockroach, and he watched betting slips change hands well out of reach of the law. His vocabulary grew to include the sort of words he would never be able to use at the Sunday dinner table, and he tasted his first Gold Flake, walking across the pit yard after a long day’s shift.

  All this before he was fourteen years old. Fourteen.

  The thought reminded him that next month would bring his birthday. Suddenly restless, he pushed back the bed-clothes and swung his bare feet onto the rag rug.

  The trouble with his birthday was that it heralded the beginning of the winter, and the endless weeks when he saw daylight only on a Sunday. That was no fun. Just give him mornings like this one, he thought.

  Quietly he padded over to the window and pulled back the curtain to look out.

  Not a soul in the rank was stirring yet. On the opposite side of the yard, the doors of the privies and wash-houses were firmly closed, the only sound being the patient clucking of the Clements’s hens in their pen in the gardens beyond.

  Ted leaned on his elbows, letting his gaze run idly over the wash-house blocks and the bits of gardens he could see between them—small segments of rich, brown earth broken up by potato haulms, cabbages and runner beans.

  Then he stiffened suddenly, his eyes narrowing. What was that down at the end of the Durrants’ garden, moving slowly among the feathery green parsnip tops?

  A fat muddy-pink pig moved lazily and methodically through the parsnip patch.

  The Durrants’ neighbours all complained about the pig, but Martha had always overruled them. She was very partial to home-cured pork and bacon, and one pig had succeeded another in the wooden sty at the end of the garden.

  Now, the current one had got out, and was having the time of her life, turning the vegetable patch into a sea of mud.

  Unable to contain his delight, Ted snorted with laughter. Ther
e was no need to worry that the pig might get into their garden for Martha had persuaded her poor hen-pecked husband to surround their ground with chicken wire, believing her neighbours at number nine to be encroaching on her vegetable plot. Now, that was serving as a barrier to keep the pig in!

  Ted’s laughter disturbed Fred.

  “What the devil’s going on?” he muttered raising his head from the pillow, and Jack, too, opened his eyes and kept them open to see his brother hanging out of the window.

  “Is there a fire?” he asked eagerly.

  Ted began to laugh again.

  “Better than that. Come over here, boys, and see what I can see!”

  They came, clambering over the beds and a sleepy Jim.

  “It’s old Mother Durrant’s porker!” Fred said unnecessarily. “ He’s having a go at her parsnips!”

  “Hell have the lot up in a minute,” Jack commented anxiously, and Ted laughed again.

  “Pigs do. They’ll root up anything. Serve her right, I say, the old misery!”

  “Didn’t we ought to tell somebody?” Jack asked worried, but before the others could shout him down, a sudden commotion disturbed the Sunday-morning calm.

  From almost immediately below their window came the sound of agitated cries and a door banging. Charlie Durrant appeared, clad only in a pair of long woolen underpants, whose baggy seat drooped three-quarters of the way down his thin thighs, and shirt with the tails flapping just above the seat of the underpants. Behind him, her night-gown billowing from beneath a hastily pulled-on coat, came Martha, waving her arms wildly to urge her husband on. Curling rags were still wound in her thin hair, and her plump feet were pushed into a pair of fashionable high-cut shoes.

  Across the yard they ran, one behind the other, and down the path between the wash-houses. They reached the pig and began chasing it back to its sty, looking like two animated scarecrows, and the boys’ merriment overflowed. Holding on to one another and to the window-sill, they roared and roared, the tears rolling down their cheeks.

  “I bet there’ll be pork for dinner next Sunday!” Fred chortled.

  And Jim added drily, “Pork, but no parsnips, by the look on it!”

  That set them off again and they were still laughing when their oddly dressed neighbours came back up the path, both red in the face, Martha’s high-heeled shoes caked with mud, and Charlie’s white underpants dirt-streaked on the back where he had wiped his hands. And when Martha glanced up and saw the four delighted faces looking down at her from the bedroom window, her anger only amused the boys the more.

  “I thought she was going to have a stroke,” Ted said afterwards. “That’s just how she looked!—sort of red and popping, and her mouth going, but no words coming out.”

  But Martha did not have a stroke. After shaking her fist at the boys, she dragged Charlie into the kitchen and out of sight, and with a sense of anticlimax they realized the free show was over.

  They were still chuckling about it, however, when Charlotte called them to breakfast, half an hour later, and they told the story yet again as they watched her turn fried potatoes and rashers of streaky bacon in the pan. But their amusement was not to last much longer.

  Just as Charlotte had finished dishing up, they heard someone knocking on the back door.

  “What a time to choose!” Charlotte said, annoyed. “Jack, go and see who it is, there’s a good boy. And the rest of you get on with your breakfast while it’s hot.”

  They began to eat, casting curious glances in the direction of the scullery, but when Jack appeared in the doorway followed by Charlie Durrant, knives and forks dropped and six pairs of eyes were fixed on the hesitant and distinctly unhappy figure, whose woollen underpants were now covered by a pair of trousers.

  Charlie Durrant drove the winding engine at Grieve Bottom Pit, and enjoyed the freedom of being more or less his own master. It was a pleasure he certainly did not enjoy at home. Martha hounded him mercilessly, and none of the Halls had any doubt that it was Martha who had sent him on this errand.

  “Well, Charlie,” Charlotte said, putting down her fork. “ What can we do for you?”

  For a moment Charlie did not reply. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and stood mopping nervously at a dewdrop that had caught in his stringy moustache.

  “You had a bit of trouble earlier on, didn’t you?” James prompted him.

  “That’s right.” With an effort Charlie gathered his courage to begin. “ Our pig got out and a fair mess she’s made of the garden, too. There’s not a parsnip not damaged, and the swedes look as if they’ve had their lot, an’ all.”

  Charlotte clucked sympathetically, and encouraged, Charlie went on: “Martha’s had to go back to bed, she’s so upset. I reckon it’ll bring on one of her heads.”

  The boys, who knew Martha’s ‘heads’ could keep her in bed for a day and sometimes more, exchanged glances of suppressed delight, and Charlotte gave them a warning glance.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Charlie,” she said. “ But what can we do for you?”

  Charlie carefully folded his handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket, but before he could reply, Amy asked, “How did the pig get out, Mr Durrant?”

  The innocent question brought Charlie to life like a dummy in a pier peep-show when the penny dropped. His head came up with a jerk, a muscle in his left eyelid twitched violently, and he whirled around to point an accusing finger at Ted.

  “You’d better ask your brother that question!” he cried, his voice trembling and high with indignation.

  They all stared blankly, but Charlotte was the first to recover her wits.

  “What do you mean by that?” she demanded.

  Intoxicated by his own daring, Charlie rushed on.

  “You know as well as I do that your Ted’s a proper varmint. He’s got a name round here that I should think you’re ashamed of.”

  “Just a minute!” James began warningly, but Charlie, in full spate for the first time in twenty years, was not to be interrupted.

  “He’s a bad boy,” he went on. “He’s plagued the life out of Martha, and led others to do the same, and if she wasn’t such a good woman, you’d have heard about it before now. But this time, he’s gone too far. Letting out our pig is beyond a joke, and …”

  “I never!” Ted cried indignantly. “I never did!”

  Charlotte silenced him with a look.

  “What proof have you got of this, Charlie?”

  “Martha saw them boys down the garden last night when it was getting dusk. Now I know for a fact that I put the catch on the pigsty after I went in to see to the porker. This morning, it were off, and you don’t need to be no politician to know how it got undone. As Martha always says when they’ve been aplaguin’ her, boys will be boys. But when it comes to letting out folks’ pigs and the like, that’s when it’s time something were done, I reckon.”

  “Just a minute, Charlie,” James was on his feet now, his face like thunder. “ What have you got to say to this, Ted? Is there any truth in what Mr Durrant says?”

  “No, Dad, there’s not!” Ted asserted, and James turned back to Charlie.

  “You’d better go on home, then, Charlie. And I’m warning you, there’ll be trouble if you go saying things like that with no proof.”

  “I don’t need no proof! I knows what I knows!” Charlie began, and James wagged a threatening finger at him.

  “I mean it, Charlie. I won’t have it, not in my own home.”

  His temper, slow to rise, was up now, and Charlotte intervened hastily.

  “Off you go, Charlie, I’ll get to the bottom of this. And I promise if Ted or any of the others are to blame, we’ll see your parsnips are replaced out of our garden. I can’t say fairer than that. Go on now!” She shooed him to the door, and behind her the stunned silence fragmented as the boys all began talking at once, and Amy burst into noisy tears. James scraped aside his chair to follow Charlie out, but Charlotte laid a restraining hand on his arm.
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br />   “No, James,” she warned. “We don’t want brawling on a Sunday.”

  “But I didn’t do it, Mam, honest I didn’t!” Ted protested.

  “Didn’t you?” Charlotte was annoyed at the sight of the bacon congealing on the plates, and took out her annoyance on Ted. “ I’m fed up to the teeth with getting complaints about you, my lad.”

  “You were up early this morning, Ted. I saw you looking out of the window ages ago,” Amy put in. Then her lip wobbled and her eyes filled with tears. “ Oh, Mam, what will happen? Will they put Ted in prison?”

  “Not this time,” Charlotte said heavily. “ Though the way he’s going on, it’s only a matter of time, Amy. But I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, all right. First thing tomorrow morning, we’re going to dig out half our parsnips and take them round next door. I know they’re better left till the frost’s been on them, but I can’t stand Martha Durrant’s long face looking at me till then. We’ll help her put them back in the ground. It’s the least we can do.”

  “But our Ted says he didn’t let the pig out,” James objected.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Charlotte argued. “ Between these four walls, I agree with the Durrants. Our Ted is a pickle, and it’s time he was taught a lesson. Shifting him off the screens and underground was just water off a duck’s back. Well, if he misses his parsnips this winter, maybe he’ll think twice before he gets up to his tricks again.”

  “But what about the rest of us?” Jim asked. “ Do we have to go hungry too?”

  “We’ll starve!” Amy cried, dramatically bursting into a fresh spasm of weeping. “And I’ll faint in class like Edie Presley did.”

  “You’ll faint in chapel if you don’t eat your bacon,” her mother told her, and, realizing the futility of arguing with Charlotte when her mind was made up, the family resumed their breakfast. Even James sat down again, muttering, “Your mother’s right, you know. We can’t see neighbours lose all their vegetables and do nothing about it.” Then, picking up his knife and fork, he began his breakfast once more.